F 





\D\xe Quaker Boy 
on the Farm 

at School 




Isaac SKarpless 




Class 
Book 



^ 



lonyii^htN^. 



COF.'RIGIIT DEPOSIT. 



THE QUAKER BOY 



THE QUAKER BOY 
ON THE FARM 
AND AT SCHOOL 



BY 
ISAAC SHARPLESS 



ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

JANE ALLEN BOYER 
AND AMY C. SHARPLESS 



THE BIDDLE PRESS 

loio CHERRY STREET 
PHILADELPHIA 



HEADLEY BROS. 

LONDON 



<S3 



COPYRIGHT 1908 

BY 

THK BIDULE PRESS 





vania 




Pennsyl vant a 
vaker l3( 



WAS a beautiful corner of Penn- 
sylvania in which the Quaker settlers 
of 1682 and the following years found 
a home. The great river fronted it, and streams, some of them 
navigable, paralleled each other up into the country. The gently 



8 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 

rolling upland was covered with a great forest of hard wood 
which, when cleared, uncovered a soil of unusual fertility and 
freedom from surface rocks. Within it wandered immense 
numbers of deer and not a few elk. The only animals of 
prey were the small wolf and the black bear, neither dangerous 
under ordinary conditions. The marshes abounded in water- 
fowl, and at certain seasons wild pigeons and other migratory 
birds could be captured in abundance by throwing stones into 
the flocks. There were turkeys, pheasants, and partridges. 
Shad and other sea-fish were plentiful in the river, and the 
little streams were amply stocked with trout. 

Nor were the settlers unworthy of their possessions. A 
few men of rank and education began a life of trade in the 
towns, burying their coats of arms as unworthy a Christian 
democracy. But the greater part were British yeomen, some 
landowners in their native country, the most of them renters 
who had loaded all their furniture, plate, clothing, and in some 
cases framed houses, into the little sailing vessels, and set out 
on the two or three months' voyage to the free land which 
the foresight and generosity of William Penn had secured. 
They had shown their capacity to suffer by lying months and 
years in British dungeons for a point of conscience, small per- 
haps, but which, because it was conscience, they had per- 
sisted in thinking was worth more to them than property or 
liberty or life.. They had shown their fraternity by offering 
themselves — man for man and woman for woman — for their 
unfortunate brethren who were about to die for conscience' 
sake in the horrible pest-holes of England. They were to 
find the free air of the woods, a soil as good as the best they 
had left, a life of conquest over nature to draw out their best 
energies, and, better than all, an ideal commonwealth where 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 9 

persecution should never come, and where fraternity would 
know no bounds of rank or sect or race. 

It was a venture, as all emigration is; but the results 
were happy. There was none of the suffering of Massachu- 
setts and Virginia. Flesh and fish and fowl were to be had 
for the capture. ''We could buy deer for two shillings and 
a turkey for one. shilling" of the Indians, one of them has re- 
corded. The wise arrangement of Penn had made the red- 
men more than friends. They were glad to have the Quakers, 
who paid for everything, who never cheated them, whose guns 
were used only against the beasts of the wood, and who tried 
their best to restrain them from fire-water. Little troubles 
occurred. The Council listened to a complaint of the Welsh 
settlers of Haverford against the Indians "for the rapine and 
destruction of their hogs," but the Indian "kings" were sent 
for, and the matter quickly settled. The Quaker home and 
children were left in perfect security, while the adult attended 
the quarterly meeting, or the market-place at Philadelphia or 
Chester, and so far as the Friends were concerned these kindly 
relations never ceased. 

A cave in the bank, a brush lean-to against a rock, or a 
log hut sufficed for the first winter; but better houses soon 
arose. Each settler had made his purchase in England from 
rude maps, and quickly found it in the woods. The sales were 
liberal, five hundred to five thousand acres to a family, for a 
trifling sum and a quit-rent. The woods fell before their axes, 
and with a plough drawn by oxen the soil was quickly pre- 
pared for wheat, barley, and Indian corn. In one year every 
farmer had a sufficiency of everything but money, and im- 
provements began. The old houses were discarded and stone 
buildings arose. Barns for crops and cattle kept pace with the 



lo ' A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 

clearing land and increasing produce. As the first settlers 
died the great farms were divided among the boys, or the 
younger ones plunged farther into the woods and repeated the 
process. 

They were practically all Friends. If you lay a straight- 
edged ruler from a point on the Delaware River midway be- 
tween Trenton and Easton to the point where the Susquehanna 
crosses Mason and Dixon's line, you will cut off a corner 
which for one hundred and fifty years was largely Quaker 
land. Up to the Civil War not a few townships knew no land- 
owners outside the fold, and in many cases the farms had 
come down without a deed except the one from William 
Penn. As time progressed the farms grew smaller by 
subdivisions, till one hundred and twenty-five acres or 
thereabouts became the normal size, and the productiv- 
ity always increased. The young man who could not 
buy a fann with borrowed money and stock it, and by 
middle life have it clear of debt, was seriously lacking 
in business management or economy, or both. Expenses 
of living were trifling. The boys did the work outside and 
the girls within, and there were usually plenty of both. The 
fields and the garden gave the vegetables, and the barn, the 
pig-pen, and the poultry-yard the meat. The housewife spun 
the flax, wove the cloth, cut out and sewed the garments. 
She made sausage and scrapple and mince pies, carpets and 
candles and feather-beds. Such lives developed qualities of 
saving and hoarding, and so it happened that not a few fami- 
lies passed from generation to generation an ever-increasing 
stock of money at interest, and enlarged houses and barns, 
and ideas of fine tillage and care of soil, and furniture plain 
but solid, and shade-trees around the place, and looks that be- 
spoke comfort, homelikeness. and family pride. 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 



II 



The New England farm developed strong men; but the 
rugged soil did not invite their continuance, and the strength 
of New England went to the cities or the West. The western 
farm made great crops, but western farmers are nomads, and 
in general have no ancestral homes. Perhaps nowhere else in 




the United States has there been that combination of soil and 
social conditions which created a satisfied, intelligent, perma- 
nent yeomanry. The land itself was treated almost as a sen- 
tient being. It must not be abused any more than a horse or 
an ox. It must be fed. and not cropped into sterility, and so. 
unlike the south land, it grew in fertility with each generation, 
clearer of weeds and stones, more mellow and rich and kindly. 
The great stone houses, of plain but harmonious outline, the 
whitewashed outbuildings and fences, the evergreen and de- 
ciduous trees, all bespoke the comfortable and prosperous 



12 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 



home, to which the wandering children would return as long 
as they lived, as the family gathering called them from dis- 
tant business or residence, and to which their thoughts would 
revert with ever-increasing fervency as they reviewed their 
boyhood days. 

For truly the Pennsylvania Quaker farm and homestead 
was a great place for a boy to grow into a man. The old 
conditions lasted till the Civil War. Since then there has been 
a gradual scattering of the old families, and their places have 
been taken by immigrants and renters of another type. The 




old race will be largely extinct in another generation ; but 
many a man now in middle life or beyond who has made his 
mark in Philadelphia or elsewhere, in business or professional 
life, blesses the fate that gave him the physical and moral basis 
of such a boyhood. 

The boy's life was not a vagabond life, though streams 
and woods were well known, and wild animals and birds and 
flowers were sources of unfailing pleasure and instruction. 
As soon as he was old enough there was work to be done, 
wood to carry in from the woodpile, cows and horses to bring 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 13 

in from the field, apples to gather, and fruits and vegetables 
to pick. The work was done, if not willingly yet faithfully, 
and a great lesson learned. 

The father was an autocrat, a kindly and wise one whose 
commands were never questioned. "John," said he to his boy 
at the table, "John, hold thy plate." 

"1 don't want that, father," faltered the boy. 

"I did not ask thee what thee wanted; I told thee to hold 
thy plate;" and John took what was offered and ate it with- 
out a word. If too wet to go to the field, father and John 
could pull weeds in the garden. John did not understand why 
this was not as wet as the field, but father said not, and John 
accepted it as true. When too cold for other work, you 
could pick stones in the field. Again John could not under- 
stand why prying up stones frozen into the ground, with glove- 
less fingers, was not as cold as anything else ; but father said it 
was cold-weather work, and when John got homesick at board- 
ing school he sadly reflected that if only he could go home he 
would gladly even pick stones with the thermometer at freez- 
ing. As the boy grew up, the duties and responsibilities in- 
creased, and the labor was the more continuous. Driving 
horses to plough or harrow, the more strenuous work of the 
harvest time, the family consultation as to which field to work 
out of grass for the regular routine of corn, oats, and wheat, 
and two years of mowing, to be followed by pasture, became 
his larger functions. 

But there was always plenty of time for the boyish re- 
creation which the country afforded. He was never a slave 
to work or to authority. There was the stream to fish, d!nd 
the charms of fishing grew upon him, till a busy life after- 
wards only made it more enticing, as memory brought back 



14 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 



the great sucker in the mill-dam or trout in the clear stream. 
There were muskrats to be trapped in winter and the raccoon 
that stole the chickens and turkeys. There were the games in 
which the boys on the neighboring farms would join, or the 
ride on the big horse sled in winter. All of these and many 
more were constant sources of pleasure and education which 
the older people were too wise to curb. 




Nor were intellectual opportunities lacking. Every 
house had some books — often Friends' books, Scivel's 
History and Piety Promoted ; the first stirred the boy's denom- 
inational patriotism as he heard of the brave deeds of his an- 
cestors, but for the latter, to tell the truth, he did not care 
much, though he had to take a share of it on First Day. There 
was, too, the neighborhood library sustained by the farmers for 
a few miles around. The key was kept in a neighboring store 
or meeting-house and any one could get it, select his book, 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 15 

register it himself, lock up, and go home. As practically all 
the subscribers were Friends, fiction was disallowed; but the 
healthy boy found in history and biography and travel a sub- 
stitute which charmed him through many a wintry evening 
and slack hour through the day. Macaulay was too critical 
of the Friends, and was outlawed; but Rollin and Ranke and 
Motley and Prescott became a part of the boy's permanent 
stock in trade, and he learned to read to good purpose. The 
wilds of Africa were explored with Livingstone, and the 
wastes of Greenland with Franklin and Kane; and if an oc- 
casional volume by Mayne Reid crept in through an unsus- 
picious committee, on the ground that it was a record of 
travel, probably no one was the worse. The different families 
read the same books, and a comparison of views kept the mem- 
ory fresh. 

But above all else these old farmers retained something 
of the conscience of their ancestors. To go to meeting twice 
a week was the most inevitable part of the weekly programme. 
It was always the "previous engagement." 

"It will rain to-day and that hay just ready to come in 
will be spoiled," John would urge on a Fourth Day morning. 

"Harness the horse and we will all go to meeting," was 
the uncompromising answer. 

The meeting was mostly silent, just a gathering of men, 
women, and children sitting on unpainted and straight-backed 
benches for an hour. The boys did not always enter pro- 
foundly into the spiritual exercise of the occasion, and some- 
times perhaps even the older ones had not such sustained 
niystical communion as their faces then seemed to indicate. 
But after all, the lesson of the supremacy of religious duty 
over all business affairs was well taught, and the quiet in- 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 17 

fluence of the Spirit was not always a delusion ; while the 
cramped physical powers of the healthy boy found relief after- 
wards in an unrestrained and joyous exercise. The habit of 
at least formal attention to religious obligations was seldom 
lost. 

It was in the "monthly meetings" that the moral stan- 
dards were set and maintained. These business sessions were 
as imperative upon old and young as the purely religious 
gatherings. The "queries" were to be answered in open meet- 
ing, not individually but as a body, and the answer inscribed 
in a book. 

Do you go to meeting regularly, and behave yourself when 
there ? 

Do you have "love and unity" with other members? 

Do you live a simple life, avoid complicity with warlike 
operations or judicial oaths? 

Do you look after the poor Friends, and do you pay your 
debts? — and other questions relating to conduct and habits. 

The boy, perhaps, could not define Quakerism ; but he 
got an idea very firmly that a quiet, kindly, moral life was 
required of him, an idea which often survived the vastly lower 
standards among which he had to work out his adult conduct. 

The home confirmed the meeting, — or the reverse might 
be a more true way of writing it. The little silence before 
each meal, the Bible-reading at the breakfast-table and on 
First Day evening by one whose life was a manifest effort to 
live by its precepts; even the absence of formal teaching and 
the general reticence as to religious subjects, along with the 
seriousness at rare intervals when the rebuke or the com- 
mendation was evidently needed, — all these were daily build- 
ing character, whether any one was conscious of it or not. 



i8 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 



In 1827 Qiiakerdom was rent by the great "Separation." 
Hicksite and Orthodox, as they were popularly called, lived 
side by side as neighbors and relatives ; but a great gap opened 
between them. The Orthodox were influential in Philadel- 
phia, but the Hicksites controlled the country. They kept the 
old stone meeting-houses. For a time the two worshiped 
in the two ends of the same house, or in the same room at 
different hours ; but these arrangements in the excited state of 
feeling were too close for peace. All through these Quaker 
counties one sees meeting-houses in duplicate, the old one 
almost always Hicksite. The feeling during the first genera- 




tion was intense. Social intercourse ceased. Min- 
isters of the two bodies meeting in the road gave each other the 
least possible recognition, and mutual individual "disown- 
ments" cleared the skirts of each of responsibility for the other. 
The two had the same moral standards and the same methods 
of worship. In the main they looked at life from the same point 
of view; but the Plicksite was supposed to have beliefs with 
Unitarian tendency, the Orthodox to be unbearably dogmatic; 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 19 

and so they parted, except that the boys and girls might safely 
go to the same little school by the meeting-house. 

They were not potent factors in party politics. They 
had forgotten the great colonial days when the Holy Experi- 
ment was building the most prosperous, free, and progressive 
commonwealth along the Atlantic, under Quaker legislation 
unintermitted for seventy years ; when David Lloyd, John 
Kinsey and Isaac Norris led the Quaker hosts in a well- 
defined but strictly moral political machine. They had rather 
accepted the mediaeval doctrine that introversion and not out- 
ward activity was the badge and safeguard of the Friend. In 
township matters, as school director, or road supervisor, they 
performed their duty, and the Quaker vote could be counted 
on, on election day. But the noisy convention and political 
meeting did not know them, and the candidate for an ofiice 
higher than township was an object of concern. They were 
conservative in most matters, but on a moral question to which 
their society was committed, they could be the leaders of the 
radicals. Every Quaker was an anti-slavery man, and many 
of them were uncompromising abolitionists of the Garrison 
type. The Underground Railway had an unfailing route 
through the Quaker counties, and the runaway once over the 
line found plenty of sympathy and active aid. The boy at the 
table or during the winter evening drank in, in respectful 
silence, the iniquities of slavery till a negro became a hero, 
and he would warmly resent any appellation less respectful 
than coldred man. 

Then came on the war. It seemed to present a conflict 
of duties. The elders saw clearly that the long history of 
opposition to slavery was fairly matched by an equally long 
testimony against war; yet to a man they fervently desired 



20 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 



the success of the Union arms. If the tradition of John Wool- 
man and Anthony Benezet and the example of John G. Whit- 
tier kept them true to the cause of freedom, the history of their 
own ancestors during the Revolutionary War kept them true 
to the cause of peace. For it was known that every little 
complicity with war had been conscientiously avoided. When 
the American army had taken blankets and left the money 




with the boy, the father had ridden miles to find the purchaser 
and return the price, though, of course, he never recovered the 
blankets. When a boy had thrown down a bar in response 
to the demand of a British trooper, enforced with a drawn 
sword, the conviction that he might be a party to taking 
human life so seized him that he refused to lower the oth- 
ers. These traditions and convictions held the soberer ones 



22 



A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 



steadily to non-participation. The boys and young men were 
more influenced by the excitement, and some of them re- 
sponded to the call. Such usually lost their Quaker connec- 
tion, but never the influences of their earlv training. 




What better boyhood could there be for a man who is to 
do great work? A body hardened by years of pure air and 
active but not excessive exercise; a mind braced by a school 
life which required things to be done by himself and not by 
the teacher, and broadened by a careful reading of a limited 
number of improving books; a character formed by regular 
duties, the example of conscientious living, the ever-present 
sacredness of moral responsibility, abhorrence of evil, and 
sympathy with suffering; and a hearty respect for a religion 
of the simplest character and absolutely without hypocrisy. 

In some respects, to be sure, it was a narrow and circum- 
scribed life; but these qualities may not be the worst evils Uir 
the bov. There was to be plenty of breadth and liberty later, 
and he approached manhood without the feeling that life was 
a sucked orange; rather it was to him a glorious opportunity 
of unknown possibilities in which his untried powers of strong 
resolve and sustained effort, kept well in hand, might do their 
best. 




HEN the Pennsylvania Quaker boy from 
the farm reached the age of twelve or four- 
teen years, he was sent to boarding school. 
There was only one possibility in the choice of a school, the 
school which had educated all his ancestors, and the ancestors 
of all his playmates since 1799. 

It was in the days following the Revolutionary War that 
this school was conceived. The Friends had withdrawn from 
politics. A time of war and revolution was no time for them. 



28 The Quaker Boy at School 

It was assumed that they had been sympathizers with the Brit- 
ish, an assumption in the case of the wealthy merchants of 
Philadelphia, probably true; but, for most of the others, true 
only in the negative sense that they did not approve the means 
taken to establish independence. They would have preferred 
further protest, commercial opposition and passive resistance. 
Their whole history revolted at the idea of war, and hence 
there was no place for them in the government which they 
had organized under William Penn, and in which, till 1756, 
they had been the pervading force. Many of their young men 
could not be controlled, however, and preferred the active serv- 
ice of their country to their church connection. 

The defection of the aggressive element was a serious loss 
to Quakerism and left the mystical, introversive tendencies, 
always strong, in control of the development of the Society. 

Yet they felt that they had steered their organization 
through the difficult days of confusion on the straight line of 
principle. During these days they had, without faltering, an- 
nounced their consistent opposition to warfare, and had 
cleared their ranks o±* slavery. If they had lost a certain 
leadership, which, as founders of the state they had inherited, 
they had advertised their principles by suffering, and large 
accessions came to their ranks from sympathetic neighbors. 
Those who understood them, like President Washington, could 
join with him in appreciating the value of their citizenship 
"except their declining to share with others the burdens of 
common defense." 

There was, however, one danger for the future. The 
farmers were prospering as never before. Great families of 
children were growing up, and as they reached majority were 
building new homes on the adjacent lands. But many of these 



The Quaker Boy at School 



29 




children had no education except such as the primary school 
at the meeting house afforded, and some, hardly that. The 
well educated Friends of the city were the first to see the 
danger. 

Whether John Dickinson was a member of the Society of 
Friends at any time of his life, is an enigma of history. His 



30 The Quaker Boy at School 

ancestors were, as were also his wife and children. There is 
much in the conservative and legal arguments of the "Farmers' 
Letters" and his appeals to the crown, and in his unwillingness 
to take the critical plunge into independence, to suggest Quaker 
influence. But he was a Brigadier General during the war, 
and an ardent though cautious advocate of American ideas. 

His sympathies were all with Friends and his own well- 
trained youth and broad intelligence saw the danger of a com- 
munity without educated lay leaders, and whose principles did 
not demand ex-en of their ministers any extensive mental train- 
ing. He wrote many urgent letters to waken the Friends to 
a sense of the danger, and when a plan for a boarding school 
was finally evolved, gave a large contribution to its establish- 
ment. 

Associated with him was Owen Biddle. He had been a 
fiery patriot in war times, a member of the Board of War 
of Pennsylvania, a man of means and education, and, withal, 
something of an astronomer. But, as one of his friends wrote : 
"The age of miracles was not yet passed," and when the ex- 
citement was over, he wTut through a period of serious re- 
pentance, and made his peace with Friends. 

He drafted the plans which made the school possible. As- 
sociated with these, were the Pembertons, the Drinkers, the 
Churchmans, and others who had always kept in the straight 
and narrow way. The school was launched. Six hundred 
acres of beautiful land in Chester County, twenty miles from 
Philadelphia, were purchased, sufficiently inaccessible to suit 
the monastic idea of the time, as to a proper location. 

When, in the early days of railroads, one was proposed 
through the tract, the influence of the school was great enough 
to divert it to an adjacent valley a mile away. A great brick 



The Quaker Boy at School 31 

building of harmonious proportions was erected. No musical 
sounds should profane its halls, nor an_y art lead away from 
simplicity ; but the birds sang in the great trees and enticing 
vistas were opened to the cultivated fields around. The denial 
of the beauty of art seemed to make them more responsive to 
the beauty of nature. 

But what could be taught in a school managed by a great 
committee which would inevitably be governed by its most 
conservative members, for the Quaker habit of waiting for 
practical unanimity gave, in effect, the control to the least pro- 
gressive. Above the primary branches, there was not much 
place for the staple of the day. the ancient classics. They had 
too many heathen allusions and influences to be safe reading 
for young Friends. While not entirely excluded, the boys did 
not think in the ideas and language of Greece and Rome. No 
one thought of teaching modern languages and the days of 
laboratory science and te.xt-books of history had hardly 
dawned. It was not the Quaker idea to teach theology. The 
spirit of it was supposed to be drawai in with the religious serv- 
ices and customs of the place. No thought of making min- 
isters introduced itself into the school, though some of the 
Friends occasionally admitted that if a Divine power did 
create a minister, a good education might add to his usefulness 
outside of meeting, if not within. 

There was no danger, theological or intellectual, in reading, 
or spelling, or penmanship, and these were taught with a suc- 
cess the present might envy, if not emulate. Besides this, two 
other branches were safe and edifying. The backbone of the 
school w^as mathematics. Enoch Lewis, Benjamin Hallovvell 
and Samuel Alsop, all authors of mathematical treatises of 
merit, kept up the spirit to a high water mark. The grading 
of the school was based on proficiency in this one subject. 



z^ 



The Quaker Boy at School 



The first mathematical teacher was a Premier in the school, 
not a principal, for that, the school did not have for about a 
century, but a sort of a glorified first among equals. In this 
subject every boy went at his own pace, no rigid classification 
restrained the genius, or unduly hurried the plodder. The 
neatly written blank books of the first score of years of last 
century, in which eclipses were deduced from the elements 

with the mathematical 
processes in detail, and 
the problems of terrestrial 
mechanics based on geom- 
try, were worked with 
difificult simplicity by boys 
in their teens, are lessons 
for their weaker brethren of to-day. 

Another subject which might prop- 
erly exist in unrestrained proportions 
in such a school was English Grammar. 
Lindley Murray and Gould Brown 
and other Quaker grammarians had 
blazed the way, and John Comly, John 
Forsythe, and other lesser lights could 
follow. It was much learning of 
formal rules and notes and exceptions, and parsing of involved 
sentences, and correcting of imperfect ones. Some fine speci- 
mens of literature were memorized, and the classic etymologies 
of many common words were drilled into boys with a thor- 
oughness which made them very unpopular. 

This was the regimen which confronted our boy at any 
time within three-quarters of a century of the founding — and 




The Quaker Boy at School 33 

girl too, for in the other end of the great building with neutral 
territory between them, his own sister and the sisters of his 
mates lived a mysterious life in an unknown territory. 

The rules given him were largely hortatory : "On awaken- 
ing in the morning, endeavor to turn your thoughts towards 
your great Creator, the Author of all our blessings," or relate 
to common decorum or politeness: "When strangers speak 
to you, give a modest, audible answer with your faces turned 
towards them." 

He had had no chance at home against the overpowering 
will of his father, and the imposing Governor seemed a still 
more formidable controller of events. Numbers, however, 
gave courage, and paying little attention to the excellent gen- 
eralities of the Committee, he soon found himself engaged in 
a game of courage and skill against that dreaded official. He 
had, perchance, been somewhat schooled in the game by an 
oiuer brother, whose defeats and victories had been many 
times exuitingly recounted in his hearing. Rules were the 
instruments of authority, and penalties paid the price of de- 
feat. These were the Governor's weapons, but the boy had 
the audacity of youth and the sympathy and aid of a hundred 
friends. To go to a town three miles away out of bounds, and 
spend three cents (all he had) in cakes, was an heroic achieve- 
ment, if successfully accomplished. But if, alas, he was late to 
dinner, and hence had to give an account of himself, it meant 
a week couped in a little yard, where he could only play mar- 
bles with his fellow victims, while the other boys were at ball. 
This was fair enough, for he knew the risk, and would have 
borne it patiently except for the thought of home, whither the 
story was sure to go. 

Stolen apples, too, were wonderfully sweet, when he hero- 



34 



The Quaker Boy at School 



ically made the great venture into the old orchard and re- 
turned with a pocketful of unripe and gnarled fruit, to be dis- 
tributed as proof of his prowess among admiring friends. If 
he could purloin a piece of pie from the table and carry it un- 
der his jacket, again he was a hero, for he not only risked de- 
tection by his master, but also the chance of a "jam" on the 
stairway if his fellows knew that the contraband could be 
squeezed into an undistinguishable mass against his shirt. 




His best chance, however, was at night. 
The whole great upper story of the house 
was full of beds and to these at 8.30 o'clock, after Bible 
reading and a time of silence, wended the still unsub- 
dued boys. Hie lights were turned out and the Governor 
in felt slippers was an unseen snd unheard agent of the 



The Quaker Boy at School 35 

society for law and order. But when all was quiet and every- 
one was asleep, this official w^ould betake himself noiselessly 
to more congenial society downstairs. Here was the oppor- 
tunity for which the boy near the door had been waiting. He 
had noted the retreating form brush past him as he hid in 
ambush, and after due time had elapsed to make sure of his 
ground, had given the signal. A rain of pillows descended on 
the heads of the sleepers, beds were overturned, and a delight- 
ful and exciting anarchy ruled supreme. The best must be 
made of it, for, in the nature of things, it could not last. The 
wise boy found his bed before a crisis was reached, but the 
luckless youth of imprudent tendencies wandered far from 
home, and when, in the midst of the unsuspecting rioters, the 
light was suddenly struck, and the Governor's all-seeing eye 
penetrated every corner, empty beds told the tale. There was 
a great clearing up the next day. 

Such conflicts varied with the opportunities of the different 
generations. There was too much repression for modern 
ideas, too great a dependence on authority and too little on 
sympathy and influence. Whenever a teacher caught the boy 
spirit, helped in the games, took long botanical and minero- 
logical walks in a locality unusually rich in objects of interest, 
or got down to the intellectual difficulties or aspirations ot the 
boys, disorder vanished and loyalty prevailed. There was a 
goodly number of such men and their influence was profound 
and lasting over responsive spirits. 

The keynote of the school was "a guarded religious educa- 
tion." The fir^t adjective was supposed to refer to the exclu- 
sion of un-Friendly, as well as immoral, influences. Only 
members were adniitted, and the Quaker peculiarities of dress 
and language were enforced with undeviating rigidity. The 



The Quaker Boy at School 37 

moral standards, save at times, when some unrighteous boys 
got in by accident, were also uncompromising and started the 
boy in life with a predisposition to truthfulness and honesty 
and sobriety of thought and conduct. 

But every one of the Committee of Sixty chosen by the 
Yearly Meeting from among its most "weighty" members, 
would assert that if the school failed religiously, it was a com- 
plete failure, even though the mental influences were bracing, 
and the conduct of the boys was exemplary. Truly, when 
those sixty men and women visited the school, it was an im- 
pressive occasion. The broad-brimmed hats of the men sur- 
mounting the smooth-shaven face and long, straight-collared 
coat, the ponderous bonnets of the women, including a quiet 
face encased in an immaculate cap, with a "handkerchief" 
around the shoulders of the same ephemeral material, made an 
impression of saintliness not soon forgotten. And when 
the hour for "meeting" came as it did twice on First- 
day and once on Fifth-day, and the two hundred boys 
and girls seated themselves on the uncompromising benches 
(for then only could the sexes be in the same room) with these 
celestial figures in the minister's gallery in front and a silence 
that could be felt gathered about the assemblage, then if ever 
on earth, heaven seemed present. 

The spirit of youth was awed and he heard, as from an 
oracle, the prayer or the preaching which presently was 
sounded, as if it were the voice of God, as indeed it sometimes 
was. The sentences might or might not be grammatical, the 
delivery might be natural or a chant, the subject-matter might 
be logical and practical, or a succession of Bible phrases sug- 
gested by each other, and tending no whither, but the effect 
of the whole was solemn. It was seldom emotional. Its bur- 



38 



The Quaker Boy at School 



den was to induce the hearers to yield the heart to the oper- 
ations of the Heavenly Guide, and thereby grow in grace. 
These Divine visitations would become more frequent and defi- 
nite and potential as the result of obedience. The impulses to 
good were to be found within, rather than without, and would 
become rules of life, as well as spiritual influences. 

This from the committe. The teachers were more apprecia- 
tive of the terrestrial factors which moved the lives of boys 
and dealt in more practical problems. But however far from 
the standard of his school life the man would stray, he would 





never be able, if at all spiritual, to separate himself from the 
profound influences of those simple and sincere religious meet- 
ings. 

The men from the old school have not been prominent in 
any large measure in literature or statesmanship, but when a 
moral question is involved, they are. almost to a man, right. 
Under untoward circumstances, they stand for righteousness 
in politics and the ranks of the working reformers in and 
around Philadelphia are largely recruited from them. Their 
lives are testimonials to the efficacy of "a guarded religious 
education." 



HBRARY OF CONGRESS 





